I meet Tara once and only once, on my last trip to Rose Isle, two days before Hurricane Zeta hits. The Category 4 storm is still spinning somewhere beyond the southern horizon, hundreds of miles offshore, as my crew and I reach the bridge from the mainland. Out the windshield, I can see the occasional cloud pushing past, and if I try hard enough, I can convince myself that each one’s isolated, with no connection to the others.
We’re crammed three to a cab in our F-650, me and the boys, a dozen yards of sand and polypropylene bags tarped down in back. The boys want to hightail it as soon as we drop off the sandbagging supplies, but I made up my mind well before we left Texas. So long as volunteers are out preparing for Zeta’s arrival, I plan on being one of them. The boys seem to think this goodwill of mine is just some PR stunt, me angling for the next deal. I’ve never pulled this kind of shit before, they say, so why now? And I’m trying to tell them: I feel like I’ve got unfinished business here, like I owe this place something, though I’m not sure what.
To say we’re swimming against the current would be an understatement. Every other car is headed off the island, practically bursting with suitcases and valuables. Beyond them, the island’s stilted structures—houses, restaurants, and hotels—line up like dominoes. In five days, when the first helicopter news crews can make it out to survey Zeta’s aftermath, I’ll see for myself how few of them remain standing, the rest strewn as splintered wood across an island torn in two. But for now, Rose Isle’s still whole, its buildings intact.
We keep arguing, my crew and I, until they begrudgingly drop me off at a volunteer tent halfway down the island. As they unload supplies—having long ago learned to swallow their gripes within earshot of clients—I hop out to introduce myself to the on-site coordinators. And that’s when I see Tara.
Of course, I don’t know her name just yet. Right now, she’s merely the woman fiddling with a shovel outside the volunteer station, watching my crew dump sand onto the bluff above the seaward beach. And though I can only see a sliver of her face, angled away from me as she is, I can tell at first glance that she’s got this effortless grace to her, like she could be running on two hours of sleep and still look this poised. I try ignoring this thought—having as little time as I do for casual courtship—but by the time I’m done convincing myself I’m not attracted to her, I realize one of the volunteer coordinators is leading me her way.
“Hope you don’t mind working with the other out-of-towner,” he says, “All the locals got started at dawn, so y’all seemed the logical pair.”
I hope the shake of my head isn’t too enthusiastic in communicating that no, I don’t mind. She seems not to notice as we approach, but I offer her my right hand all the same.
“Hey there,” I say. “Name’s Randy Kirk. Guess we’ll be sandbagging together.”
The moment she turns my way, her brows flash with what I interpret as interest. But the look’s gone in a second, replaced by a blank stare that considers my outstretched hand before she shakes it. In the wind, strands of jet-black hair stream diagonally across her face. She seems a couple years younger than me—perhaps just shy of thirty—and has one of the weaker handshakes I’ve ever encountered, the type that goes dead in your hand. No ring. And her eyes are dark, cheerless, like they’ve already ceded victory to the hurricane.
She gives her first name in reply, but beyond that she’s silent. Says nothing as the coordinator leads us to our workstation on the bluff, and once we’re there, it’s he who does the talking.
“As y’all can see, we’re doing whatever we can to protect the levee hidden in this bluff.” He points one arm to the ground beneath his feet and sweeps the other along the beach, where volunteers are lining the bluff’s southern flank with sandbags. Throughout the day, I’ll learn that the island’s “burrito levee” is essentially a long sandbag, fifteen feet thick, hidden in the man-made bluff and spanning most of the barrier island’s eight-mile length. At times, I’ll spot it peeking out where its cover has eroded away, and it’ll remind me of a dead, black snake. The coordinator continues, “Add as much as y’all can to what’s already there. Pack the bags in real good, so the surf can’t sweep them away. General evac’s in four hours—we’ll come get y’all then.”
Then he’s off. I try catching Tara’s gaze, but it’s fixed on the supplies my guys dumped here. She toes an empty bag, half scowling at the thing like it wronged her in a past life.
“He said you weren’t from around here either.” I jerk my head at the departing man.
She tosses me the husk of a sandbag. “Drove down from New Orleans.”
“Didn’t expect to meet another out-of-towner today,” I say, confused by her gesture but willing to let it slide. “You got family here or something?”
“Work used to take me down here.” She jabs her shovel into our sandpile and swings a spadeful of it in my direction. It takes me a second to understand what she’s doing, but then I fuss with the bag to get it open. She drops the sand inside before digging in again.
I wait for her to return the question, but we’re wordless for two, three shovel-and-fill cycles. “I’m from Dallas, by the way,” I say. “Here on business a lot—this here’s my sand, actually.”
“Your sand?” she repeats, cocking an eyebrow as a breath of wind crescendos.
“What I mean is, I’m in sales. I sell sand, gravel, and related accessories.” I give the bag I’m holding a shake. “Like these durable rascals.” From there, I tell her the whole story: how the mayor of Rose Isle called me up two days ago, desperate for supplies when Zeta’s path changed. How my crew and I managed to round up a few truckloads of material from West Texas and cart it here just in time. How I decided to help with the readiness efforts along the way. I expect at least a lick of positivity in response, but as Tara shovels, I notice she’s glancing now and again at the beach below.
“See, we don’t recommend using local materials in these situations,” I add. “The erosion’ll be bad enough as is.”
“Better to burden more than one ecosystem.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Speaking of, I’ve got quite the history with this place. A couple years back, after the last storm, this beach had pretty much eroded away, so my team helped restore it. Desert sand’s no good for beaches, of course—too fine—but I brought in the arm of our business that does dredging services, and they scooped up sand from beneath the Gulf to fashion a new beach out of. Pretty neat, huh?”
“Neat indeed.” She gives me a once-over. “I imagine that was fairly complex to pull together. You must be quite the smooth talker.”
“I suppose,” I answer, my words tentative. In any other situation, I’d think she was flirting, but there’s no playfulness to her, the face before me as stony and unreadable as one of those carved ancient glyphs. “I mean, there were limited funds and a competing project someone else was trying to push through. But when you’ve been at this for years, building relationships on the coastal protection authority and town council, you learn how to grease wheels and dance around the typical proposal process. So, in the end, we got the contract, and the town got its beach back. Win-win.”
It’s here I finally get a reaction from her besides the typical deadpan, a single-syllable cackle escaping her lips. Stunned to silence, I question her with a look, and she says, “No such thing as a win-win. Someone’s always losing out.”
I consider contesting the point but don’t feel like picking an argument so soon. “Fair enough,” I say instead. “I mean, that’s life, isn’t it? For better or worse, I’ve got a long history of disappointing competitors and those Greenpeace types.” We’re silent a few beats, and then something clicks. “Is that you? One of those bleeding-heart conservationists? If you were competition, I’d sure as Hell remember.”
“Sure, a conservationist.” She stabs the shovel deep into our sand. “Isn’t that what we’re doing today? Conserving?”
“I knew it,” I reply. “There’s always one of you lurking about, trying to gum things up before my projects even get started. All for the sake of the birds and turtles. But come on, let’s take the example of this island’s beach restoration: what were we supposed to do? Let the shoreline disappear? Towns like this live and breathe tourism, and money buys answers. Once you’ve got the local economy up and running, you’ll have tax revenues enough for your whole eco-friendly wish list. But we had to fix the beach first.”
“So you offered them a stop-gap solution.”
“Exactly. You get it. That’s what I’m always telling my clients: I’m a solutions guy. Got a gap in need of stopping? I’m your man.”
She says nothing further, the slightest smile creeping onto her lips, and this time I let the conversation ebb. A couple seconds later, though, she stops working, forehead creased with thought. I watch her study the waves, sandbag still cradled between my hands, and say, “What’s the matter? You want to lecture me about the birds and turtles?”
“No.” She resumes shoveling. “I’m just wondering how much of this beach will be gone again once Zeta’s had her say.”
I have no answer, reluctant to admit I hadn’t yet connected those dots. At least, not consciously. But the more I churn through her words, the closer they’ll ring to that feeling of indebtedness that drove me onto this bluff today. And thirty-six hours later, I’ll obsess anew over that connection while watching coverage of the storm from my hotel room a couple hundred miles inland. By then, news networks will have just received word of Rose Isle’s destruction. Reports will be fuzzy at that point, cobbled together from whatever details will have trickled out from beneath the oppressive blanket of a raging cyclone, so the channel I’ll be tuned into will illustrate the devastation using a hastily prepared, computer-generated image.
The animation will show the island from above, as a sliver of brown—only 3,000 feet at its thickest—amid a menacing field of blue, with the burrito levee appearing as a thin red line running along its seaward side. As the reporter yammers on about a breach, a gap will appear in the line, near its middle. He’ll note that once the levee’s synthetic exterior is compromised, the sand inside does nothing to stop the storm. He’ll compare the emptying levee to a packet of sugar poured into swirling water. And then, we’ll all watch the gap grow wider and the brown give way to the blue, begging me to imagine the island’s silty soil eroding into the furious Gulf, wave by wave.
I’ve never seen a town come together as it does on the brink of disaster. The entire island buzzes with frantic energy: trucks shuttle-running the length of it to top off supplies, volunteers carrying sandbags every which way. I’m admittedly worried by the sheer number of people who haven’t yet evacuated but remind myself that hurricanes are a part of life here. Some of the older residents have probably ridden out several, through choice or necessity. They’ll be okay, I tell myself. They’ll all be okay.
Tara and I get into a decent rhythm, too, filling bags at a healthy clip once we’ve worked past our initial friction. Along the way, I manage to coax some halting conversation from her, and before I know it, she’s even volunteering information unprompted: about her life in New Orleans, about the city planning job she started a year back, about how she lives with “roommates” (and, therefore, not a boyfriend). And sure, she’s still hard-to-please as ever, but I don’t mind. Compared to all the fake personalities I deal with in sales, her frankness strikes me as refreshing.
After an hour, we’ve built up a decent reserve of ready-to-deploy sandbags, and I start hauling them to the beach. It’s there I come to understand what the coordinator meant by “pack them in.” At the base of the bluff lies a tightly set row of 3,000-pound bags, from a contract that isn’t ours, put there by the National Guard and its heavy machinery. Wedged between them and the bluff’s steep, seven-foot incline are piles of sixty-pounders, like mine and Tara’s, but this backup layer’s a complete mess, each bag evidently flung there. People have even taken to throwing large rocks into the gap, apparently unaware that their sharp edges can tear into sandbags and render them useless.
I tell Tara about the stones on one of my trips back up the bluff. “There aren’t enough to make a huge difference. I just wish it was something people knew not to do.”
But she only shrugs, looking out to the ever-roughening seas. “Doubt it’ll matter. Hurricane-force waves can exert what, over 4,000 pounds per square foot, pressure-wise? And these bags are—” she kicks a full one “—fifty pounds each?”
I blink at her, a silent correction the first thing that comes to mind: Sixty, actually. But then the meaning of her words sinks into my brain folds, and I feel this sickening warmth rising inside me, like shame and nausea had a baby. “But I’m packing them in,” I stammer. “Like the coordinator said. Behind the wall of 3,000-pounders.”
“Yeah, and once the waves get past that, these little things will be as good as useless.” Her gaze flits to our supplies, and her face furrows just like before, back when she first looked them over.
“You knew as soon as we started working, didn’t you?” I ask. “The second you saw what I brought, you thought all this was pointless.”
I take her silence as confirmation.
“What about them?” I add, pointing to the townsfolk scurrying to and from the beach. “Do they know? When the mayor called, I told him what I was bringing. Said I sure as Hell couldn’t get an excavator for more of those 3,000-pounders. You think he—”
“I’m sure he knows. He’s probably desperate and working with the best he’s got. Same with the volunteer coordinators. As for the rest of the locals, well—” she pauses to watch them work “—why bother with security theater if the audience doesn’t believe?”
I turn to the town as well. At the next sandbagging station over, two middle-aged women swap jokes as they shovel. “Look,” I tell Tara, “I sold all this stuff at cost. Paid for the shipping out of pocket, too. So, it’s not like I’m profiting off—”
“I never said I blame you. Not for today. Not for these.” She lifts an empty bag with her shovel and drops it. Midway through its descent, a gust grabs it, opens it like a sail, and sends it cartwheeling into town. We watch it go in a private vigil that ends when it disappears beneath a stilted home. And I worry our partnership’s over then, that there’s nothing to do but pack up, but when I turn back, Tara’s nosing her shovel into our sandpile. “Well,” she says, “here’s to the illusion of control.”
So I, too, resume my work. And though I no longer have the same spring in my step, in time I find a whisper of hope still inside me, claiming she’s nothing but a doomsayer. As today bleeds into tomorrow, that voice will stay with me. Even as I watch Zeta’s news coverage, rife with those cheaply rendered graphics, I’ll cling to the possibility that the early reports are overblown. But in the days following the storm, videos of it captured by survivors will surface online, and my last strands of optimism will snap. Each clip will be dark, shaky, and horrific, illustrating the carnage in a way death tolls and property damage estimates never can. From one, I’ll even learn what it looks like when soil slips out from beneath a home. At the beginning of the video, the house’s stilts will have already started their slide. The whole structure will remind me of an alien creature, maybe some long-lost relative of the giraffe, learning to walk as it meanders gulfward. There will be a certain grace to it, even, and for a moment you’ll think everything will be all right: it’ll find its sea legs and root down somewhere new. But then the stilts will hit something solid beneath the storm surge and break row by row, sending the whole structure tumbling into the waves. From there, its remains will keep skating, keep sliding, as the current pulls it to sea. And all throughout, you’ll hear someone screaming over the sound of wind and water, “My God, that’s the Landreaus’! They’re still in there! They’re still in there!”
But this will be before I’ve memorized the exact count of Zeta’s victims: twenty-seven on that island alone. Their names and faces will not yet be seared into my brain—Ally Landreau, 7 years old with a gap-toothed grin; Ellison Chambers, 72, chess FIDE master; Karleigh King, 33, bank manager, pregnant with twins. No, this video will be posted only days after my trip to the island, and at that moment, though my grief will be guilt-tipped, I’ll still be shielding myself with a warm cloak of good intentions.
After our heart-to-heart, conversation comes easier to Tara and me. It’s not all smooth sailing, of course; her answers are cryptic whenever I ask about her work on the island or how a city planner knows so much about hurricane waves. I don’t force the issue, though, and she, in turn, uses a lighter tone when she disagrees with me, so the push and pull to our relationship feels healthier, necessary even.
We keep working for three hours more, and then, once the thicker bands of clouds have reached us and waves have almost swallowed the beaches, coordinators in pickup trucks swing by to relay the final evacuation order. By this point, I’ve become the embodiment of my profession: sand in my socks and shoes, sand coating every inch of my clothes, sand gritted between my teeth. Tara’s in the same position, though, and not making a show of it, just picking the gloves off her fingers as she gazes to the horizon. So, I stand shoulder to shoulder with her and do the same.
“You know,” I say, “I was thinking about everything you said, what little we could do today, and it reminds me of a joke we tell on my crew. We always say we should offer our clients unlimited time. Then, all we’d have to do is take one of those old-fashioned hourglasses and jerry-rig a contraption that automatically takes sand from the bottom and puts it back up at the top. Boom, unlimited time.” I sigh. “If only we had something like that now.”
“And then, let me guess,” she replies, “your solution would be more sandbags?”
“Why not? Big ones, this time. Enough to cover the whole island.”
This draws a chuckle. “You’re a model salesman, Randy. A sandbagger through and through.”
At this, she makes like she’s about to go, grabbing the day pack she left a few paces away. And though I’m not sure what she meant by that comment, or where things stand between us, I choose then to forge ahead with an idea I’ve been considering all day: the only way I’ve thought of to continue unspooling this absolute riddle of a person.
“So, hey,” I say.
She turns to me, a twist of confusion on her face. “You need something?”
“Look, I know we didn’t get off to the best start. And I certainly don’t get the impression you’d ever need a few yards of sand or related accessories. All the same, I was wondering if you might consider giving me your number. I’m by New Orleans a lot and can be quite the gentleman in more everyday circumstances.”
She doesn’t speak for a few seconds. She seems to be smiling, which I interpret as positive. But when I look into her eyes, they remind me of burning coals, and if there are patterns to read in their smoldering, I don’t consider myself oracle enough to try.
“You already have it,” she says, patting me on the shoulder as she walks past. “Nice working with you this time.”
I have no response, confused as I am, but I’ll do a lot of thinking about that line in the coming weeks. That night in my hotel room, I’ll check every pocket of my sand-covered clothes for some stray note she might’ve slipped in there. The whole time, I’ll be thinking about what a fantastic story it’ll be when I find her number among all that sand, the kind worthy of a Hollywood romcom.
But there won’t be anything there. I won’t figure out what she means until weeks later, when restoration work has already started on the half-sunken island. One morning, I’ll be sitting in my Dallas apartment, cleaning up my inbox before work. There’ll be an email from my manager sitting there, and I’ll discover—to my annoyance—that it’s about Rose Isle, about Zeta. His first on the subject because, to him, my only connection to this place boils down to a few figures on a quarterly spreadsheet. And sure enough, the email will say, “really sad to see,” and “makes you stop and think,” but also, “might be good to reach out, when the time feels right, and see if our services might be of value.”
But the article he’ll link to will pique my interest, and as I read it, I’ll remember my boss’s habit of skimming past important facts. Because below its report on Zeta’s havoc, the article will detail a “series of missteps” committed by the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority in the lead-up to the storm. Its author will allege that an internal memo from within the Authority, written three years ago, acknowledged that the island’s levee wasn’t strong enough to withstand anything harsher than a Category 2 storm. The article will describe an ambitious project the Authority considered as a result, to revamp the island’s defenses by reinforcing the burrito levee and installing breakwaters offshore. It’ll note that the plan gained traction early on but was ultimately shelved in favor of what the author will call “vanity projects and patchwork repairs.”
As I read on, one other aspect of the column will catch my eye: a last name I’ll be positive I’ll have seen before. Overland. She’ll be the article’s main source, someone who worked closely on the levee revamp project. Someone who resigned in protest when her brainchild was scrapped. And when I scroll back up to find her full name, there it is: Tara Overland.
By this point, with my mind connecting dots it would rather leave disparate, I’ll search my inbox for her and unearth an email from two and a half years ago, one confirming all the dark possibilities sprouting in my brain. In some ways, its tone will be unfamiliar, belonging to a less jaded woman than the Tara I met, but the voice will be unmistakably hers:
Hi Randy,
You don’t know me, and I feel like a fool writing this, but my superiors seem to value your opinion quite highly. So, here we are.
I know you’re trying to build momentum around a beach restoration project on Rose Isle, and I’m sorry to say we’re on opposite sides there. There’s some important, potentially life-saving work that needs doing on that island concerning its hurricane defenses, which likely won’t go through if your beach deal does.
I understand you’re a businessman, with your own priorities, but I imagine we can reach a win-win arrangement here. So, please give me a call. I’d appreciate the chance to work together.
Best,
Tara Overland
Project Manager, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
O: (504) 555-9230 C: (504) 555-3422
For the first few reads, I won’t believe it’s real. I mean, sure, it’ll look familiar, but the implication behind her tactfully chosen words—that she would’ve brought me in as a supplier if I’d endorsed her project—will be so clear I’ll have difficulty accepting that I could’ve just ignored her plea. The evidence in front of me will leave no other possibility, yet that logical conclusion will be so repulsive, so contrary to everything I’ve thought myself to be, that I’ll reread her message seven, eight times in search of some complication or catch within it to explain away my actions. But no. I’ll find no such salvation. Instead, the more I stare at the email, the more I’ll realize just how easy it would’ve been to see it appear in my inbox, skim it over, and pay it no mind. How logical it would’ve been, then, to ignore her number whenever she called to follow up. How inevitable that this entire episode would slip from my memory in time.
I’ll consider calling her then. To apologize. I’ll think about it a good long while, in fact, dialing half her number several times. Eventually, though, I’ll realize I’d be doing so for my sake, not hers. So, instead, I’ll head to my apartment’s second-story balcony. It’ll be raining that day—another of those isolated thunderstorms we’ve been getting more of—and I’ll stand out there for hours, missing work entirely, searching for a rainbow that’ll never appear.
But right now, I’m on the bluff above the levee, stretching out my final moments on this doomed island to watch the Gulf dance. Behind me, some locals congratulate each other on a job well done, and my boys are yelling for me to get in the truck, but for all intents and purposes I’m alone. I find myself thinking about my hourglass joke, and I know it’s stupid, but I wish more than ever I had something like that. Because then, I could keep sandbagging as long as I need. I could fix just enough of our mistakes to help the island’s defenses hold. And maybe, if I do it all correctly, the storm would keep spinning beyond the horizon, a monstrous force forever held at bay.
